Chowan Men’s Soccer: Faith in the Future
Host to a remarkable turnaround in an area of the Carolinas where soccer is often hard to find, Chowan University is pushing the game forward.
For you to understand what the current state of the Chowan University men’s soccer program means, you need to know how far it has come.
When I was a freshman on Chowan’s campus in August 2008, the soccer team was as dreadful as possible. They played twenty games, lost every single one of them, and only scored three goals. They gave up 104.
That’s right, for the season they had a goal differential of -101.
Fast forward to September 6, 2017. Five years removed from my Chowan graduation, I am scrolling through social media when I see a headline saying that Chowan Soccer had defeated Wingate University, the defending national champions in men’s soccer for NCAA Division II.
This did not seem possible to me; there had to be some mistake. So I clicked on the article and as it turned out, not only had we defeated Wingate, but we were holding our own in one of the toughest regions in DII soccer.
How did this turnaround happen? And what had caused such a dramatic change at my alma mater? My search led me to coach Chris Whalley.
The year before Coach Whalley arrived, Chowan soccer had gone 1–14 and had lost their last two games of the season by a combined score of 19–0 to the likes of Barton College and Bob Jones University. In his first season, they won twelve games and scored 52 goals in the twenty total matches that they played.
So, I sat down with Coach Whalley in Murfreesboro, NC to find out what happened.
According to coach, when he arrived there was not even enough of a squad to properly train. Fourteen total players and four goalkeepers comprised the entirety of the complement available to him. Priority one quickly became to increase the squad size to a reasonable number so that he could implement his methods in the program.
This was greatly aided by investment by the University. Time and again Coach Whalley pointed to the willingness of the University, and especially then president (and now Chancellor) Dr. M. Christopher White to invest in the soccer program. In fact, as we met, we sat in a brand new facility for soccer and lacrosse that had not existed when I graduated just a few years ago.
Since Dr. White has arrived at Chowan, the slogan of the historically Baptist institution has been ‘Faith in your Future’ and Dr. White has practiced that in every aspect of the school, including their athletics.
College soccer is not a given. Especially in the northeast portion of North Carolina, where football is the main fall sport on people’s minds, some schools just do not find college soccer worth it.
One notable example can be found just seventy miles to the south where Division I East Carolina University cancelled their men’s soccer program in the mid 2000's, citing a lack of success and an inability to allocate the resources necessary to improve the program.
Local soccer is hard enough to find in this part of the state, and programs like Chowan are essential to growing the game. When the administration of Chowan University showed willingness to invest in the program, they were not just helping themselves, they were helping the sport itself.
Clear evidence is found in Chowan’s youth soccer camp, which has tripled in size since Coach Whalley’s arrival and now teaches the game to over 100 kids every year.
But the contributions of the University and the tactics of Coach Whalley are not the only things that have allowed this program to rise out of the ashes. As coach said himself: “the great thing about soccer is it’s truly the world’s game.” Eleven members of the Chowan soccer program are international players, and the majority of them are English. Whalley, himself a former youth player for English club Nottingham Forest, sees the benefits that American universities and international players can offer each other. “Academically sound British players are starting to recognize the opportunity… using your athletic ability to get your degree is the big picture.”
Not every player is ready for a pro contract when they finish at European (or for that matter, American) academies, and those players need academic opportunities to set them up for life. Meanwhile, what international players bring to the college game in America is years of training and the ability to improve the technical quality on the pitch.
In addition to the international flair, college soccer in America also has a mutually beneficial relationship with the fourth division of soccer in the USSF pyramid. Readers of Soccer ‘n’ Sweet Tea will be familiar with Greenville FC defender Toby Sims and forward Lee Wattam who played for them in their opening campaign over the summer. Sims and Wattam play their college ball at Chowan during the fall, and they are not the only ones who used the fourth tier to refine their games. Coach Whalley thinks this is a tremendous opportunity for the players, and he himself coaches Lionsbridge FC of the PDL when school is out.
Whalley, speaking of the opportunities it raises for players, had this to say: “It’s a good chance to train against high level players, and who doesn’t want to play in front of two to three thousand fans? It’s awesome!”
Lower division soccer gives fans in many cities a local club to support. Then those players go back to their colleges, back to rural fans with no local ‘club,’ and we get to see those players representing our school colors in a different version of local soccer.
Chowan University now plays in Conference Carolinas. Three teams on their schedule are nationally ranked, and their league is widely regarded as one of the better DII leagues in the South.
I attended their first game of the season against Shaw University (who is in their second year of building their own soccer story) and watched as the Chowan Hawks rattled off a convincing 5–1 win in which they scored four goals in the second half.
Chowan’s soccer field has no lights, and sits in a bowl with high arching hillsides all around, so their kickoff time was 4:00pm on a Thursday, not ideal for drawing local fans who have to work, but the attendance was still good, and current university president Dr. Kirk Peterson was there to see the Hawks perform.
Such days would never have happened just ten years ago, and they opened this season scoring more goals in one game than they had the whole first season I watched them play.
This is a success story of the growth of the local game in a rural area, and it was made possible by the right coach, a university willing to back him, and the strength of the soccer communities in local clubs such as Lionsbridge and Greenville FC, and also their counterparts overseas.
If you haven’t had the chance to see a college soccer game, I encourage you to go. Support local soccer both at the club level and at our American universities.
A big thank you to Coach Whalley not only for his time, but also for making me a proud alumnus. Good luck on the rest of the season and GO HAWKS!
